Grit (22 page)

In the parable of the bricklayers, everyone has the same occupation, but their subjective experience—how they themselves
viewed
their work—couldn't be more different.

Likewise, Amy's research suggests that callings have little to do with formal job descriptions. In fact, she believes that just about
any
occupation can be a job, career, or calling. For instance,
when she studied secretaries, she initially expected very few to identify their work as a calling. When her data came back, she found that secretaries identified themselves as having a job, career, or calling in equal numbers—just about the same proportion she'd identified in other samples.

Amy's conclusion is that it's not that some kinds of occupations are necessarily jobs and others are careers and still others are callings. Instead, what matters is whether the person doing the work
believes
that laying down the next brick is just something that has to be done, or instead something that will lead to further personal success, or, finally, work that connects the individual to something far greater than the self.

I agree. How you
see
your work is more important than your job title.

And this means that you can go from job to career to calling—all without changing your occupation.

“What do you tell people,” I recently asked Amy, “when they ask you for advice?”

“A lot of people assume that what they need to do is
find
their calling,” she said. “I think a lot of anxiety comes from the assumption that your calling is like a magical entity that exists in the world,
waiting to be discovered.”

That's also how people mistakenly think about interests, I pointed out. They don't realize they need to play an active role in
developing and deepening
their interests.

“A calling is not some fully formed thing that you find,” she tells advice seekers. “It's much more dynamic. Whatever you do—whether you're a janitor or the CEO—you can continually look at what you do and ask how it connects to other people, how it connects to the bigger picture, how it can be an expression of your deepest values.”

In other words, a bricklayer who one day says, “I am laying bricks” might at some point
become
the bricklayer who recognizes “I am building the house of God.”

Amy's observation that the same individual in the same occupation can at different times think of it as a job, career, or calling brought to mind Joe Leader.

Joe is a senior vice president at NYC Transit. Basically, he's the New York City subway's lead engineer. It's a task of almost unimaginable proportions. Annually, more than 1.7 billion trips are taken on the city's subways, making it the busiest subway system in the United States. There are 469 stations. Laid end to end, the tracks for the subway system would reach
all the way to Chicago.

As a young man, Leader wasn't looking for a calling. He was looking to pay back student loans.

“When I was coming out of college,” he told me, “my biggest
concern was just getting a job. Any job. Transit came to our campus to recruit engineers,
and I got hired.”

As an intern, Leader was assigned to work on the tracks. “I threw in rails, I was pulling ties, I was doing cable work for the third rail.”

Not everyone would find that work interesting, but Joe did. “It was fun. When I was first on the job, and all my buddies were business or computer guys, we used to go out, and on the way home from the bars in the evening, they used to run up and down a platform and say, ‘Joe, what's this, what's this?' I used to tell them: that's a third-rail insulator, that's an insulated joint. To me, it was fun.”

So, interest was the seed of his passion.

Joe soon ended up doing a lot of planning work, which he also enjoyed. As his interests and expertise deepened, and he started to distinguish himself, he began to see transit engineering as a long-term career. “On my days off, I went down to the laundromat to do the laundry. You know those big tables for folding your clothes? Well, all the women used to laugh because I'd bring my engineering drawings and lay them out and work on them. I really fell in love with that part of the job.”

Within a year, Joe said he began to look at his work differently. Sometimes, he'd look at a bolt or rivet and realize that some fellow had put that in decades ago, and here it was, still in the same place, still making the trains run, still helping people to get where they needed to be.

“I began to feel like I was making a contribution to society,” he told me. “I understood I was responsible for moving people every single day. And when I became a project manager, I would walk away from these big installation jobs—you know, a hundred panels or a whole interlocking [of signals]—and I knew that what we'd done was going to last for thirty years. That was when I felt I had a vocation, or I would say, a calling.”

To hear Joe Leader talk about his work might make you wonder if, after a year of not finding your work to be a calling, you should give up hope. Among her MBA students, Amy Wrzesniewski finds that many give their job only a couple of years before concluding that it couldn't possibly be their life's passion.

It may comfort you to know that it took Michael Baime much longer.

Baime is a professor of internal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. You might think his calling is to heal and to teach. That's only partly right. Michael's passion is well-being through mindfulness. It took him years to integrate his personal interest in mindfulness with the other-centered purpose of helping people lead healthier, happier lives. Only when interest and purpose melded did he feel like he was doing what he'd been put on this planet to do.

I asked Michael how he got interested in mindfulness, and he took me all the way back to his boyhood. “I was looking up at the sky,” he told me. “And the strangest thing happened. I felt like I was actually getting lost in the sky. I felt it as a sort of opening, like I was becoming much larger. It was the most wonderful
experience I've ever had.”

Later, Michael found that he could make the same thing happen just by paying attention to his own thoughts. “I became obsessed,” he told me. “I didn't know what to call it, but I would do it all the time.”

Several years later, Michael was browsing in a bookstore with his mother when he came upon a book that described his experience exactly. The book was by Alan Watts, a British philosopher who wrote about meditation for Western audiences long before it became fashionable.

With his parents' encouragement, Michael took classes in meditation throughout high school and college. As graduation approached, he
had to decide what to do next.
Professional meditator
was not an actual full-time occupation. He decided to become a doctor.

Several years into medical school, Michael confessed to one of his meditation teachers, “This isn't really what I want to do. This isn't right for me.” Medicine was important, but it didn't match up with his deepest personal interests. “Stay,” said the teacher. “You'll help more people if you become a doctor.”

Michael stayed.

After finishing his coursework, Michael says, “I didn't really know what I wanted to do. To kind of tread water, I just signed up for the first year of internship.”

To his surprise, he enjoyed practicing medicine. “It was a fine way to be helpful to people. It wasn't like medical school, which isn't so much about helping people as cutting apart cadavers and memorizing the Krebs cycle.” Rapidly, he progressed from intern to fellow to running the medical clinic to becoming the assistant director of residency and, finally, chief of general internal medicine.

Still, medicine wasn't quite what Michael would consider a calling.

“As I practiced, I realized that the thing many of my patients really needed wasn't another prescription or X-ray, but actually what I'd been doing for myself since I was a kid. What many patients needed was to stop and breathe and fully connect with their lived experience.”

That realization led Michael to create a meditation class for patients with serious health conditions. That was in 1992. Since then, he's expanded the program and, just this year, taken it on as a full-time occupation. To date, about fifteen thousand patients, nurses, and physicians have been trained.

Recently, I asked Michael to give a lecture on mindfulness for local schoolteachers. On the day of his talk, he stepped up to the podium and looked intently at his audience. One by one, he made eye contact with each of the seventy educators who'd given up their Sunday afternoon to hear what he had to say. There was a long pause.

And then, with a smile I can only describe as radiant, he began: “I have a calling.”

I was twenty-one when I first experienced the power of a
purposeful
top-level goal.

In the spring of my junior year in college, I went to the career services center to find something to do that summer. Turning the pages of an enormous three-ring binder labeled
SUMMER PUBLIC SERVICE
, I came across a program called Summerbridge. The program was looking for college students to design and teach summer enrichment classes for middle school students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Teaching kids for a summer sounds like a good idea
, I thought.
I could teach biology and ecology. I'll show them how to make a solar oven out of tinfoil and cardboard. We'll roast hot dogs. It'll be fun.

I didn't think,
This experience is going to change everything.

I didn't think,
Sure, you're premed now, but not for long.

I didn't think,
Hold on tight—you're about to discover the power of purpose.

To be honest, I can't tell you much about that summer. The details escape me. I do know I woke long before dawn each day, including weekends, to prepare for my classes. I do know I worked long into the night. I remember specific kids, and certain moments. But it wasn't until I returned home and had a moment to reflect that I realized what had happened. I'd glimpsed the possibility that a child's connection with a teacher can be life-changing—for both.

When I returned to campus that fall, I sought out other students who'd taught at Summerbridge programs. One of these students, Philip King, happened to live in the same dorm. Like me, he felt a palpable urgency to start another Summerbridge program. The idea was too compelling. We
couldn't not
try.

We had no money, no idea how to start a nonprofit, no connections,
and, in my case, nothing but skepticism and worry from parents convinced this was a catastrophically stupid way to use a Harvard education.

Philip and I had nothing and, yet, we had exactly what we needed. We had purpose.

As anyone who has started an organization from scratch can tell you, there are a million tasks, big and small, and no instruction manual for any of them. If Philip and I were doing something that was merely interesting, we couldn't have done it at all. But because creating this program was in our minds—and in our
hearts
—so overwhelmingly important for kids, it gave us a courage and energy neither of us had ever known before.

Because we weren't asking for ourselves, Philip and I found the gumption to knock on the doors of just about every small business and restaurant in Cambridge, asking for donations. We found the patience to sit in countless waiting rooms of powers-that-be. We waited and waited, sometimes hours on end, until these authority figures had time to see us. Then we found the stubbornness to keep asking and asking until we secured what we needed.

And so it went for everything we had to do—because we weren't doing it for ourselves, we were doing it for a greater cause.

Two weeks after Philip and I graduated, we opened the doors to the program. That summer, seven high school and college students discovered what it was like to be a teacher. Thirty fifth-grade boys and girls discovered what it was like to spend their summer vacation learning, studying, working hard, and—though it may have seemed impossible before they actually did it—
having fun at the same time.

That was more than twenty years ago. Now called Breakthrough Greater Boston, the program has grown far beyond what Philip and I could have imagined, providing tuition-free, year-round academic enrichment for
hundreds of students every year. To date, more than a
thousand young men and women have taught in the program, many of whom have gone on to pursue full-time careers in education.

Summerbridge led me to pursue teaching. Teaching led me to an enduring interest in helping children do so much more with their lives than they might ever dream possible.

And yet . . .

For me, teaching wasn't enough. Still unfulfilled was the little girl in me who loved science, who was fascinated by human nature, who, when she was sixteen and had a chance to take a summer enrichment class, picked—of all the courses in the catalog—psychology.

Writing this book made me realize that I'm someone who had an inkling about my interests in adolescence, then some clarity about purpose in my twenties, and finally, in my thirties, the experience and expertise to say that my top-level, life-organizing goal is, and will be until my last breath:
Use psychological science to help kids thrive
.

One reason my dad was so upset about Summerbridge is that he loves me. He thought I would sacrifice my welfare for the well-being of other people who, frankly, he didn't love as much as his own daughter.

Indeed, the concepts of grit and purpose might, in principle, seem to conflict. How is it possible to stay narrowly focused on your own top-level goal while also having the peripheral vision to worry about anyone else? If grit is about having a pyramid of goals that all serve a single personal objective, how do
other people
fit into the picture?